Donald Trump has highest working-class support among Republicans in years: poll

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has the most working-class support of any GOP candidate in 40 years, according to a new poll.

Harry Enten, CNN analyst and host Error limits Podcast said Trump is on track for the best Republican performance among union voters in 40 years. The forecast puts Harris ahead of Trump by just nine points among union voters, which Enten said would be the “worst Democratic performance in a generation.”

Democrats have slowly lost support among union voters over the years. President Joe Biden won this group by 19 points in 2020– in comparison, Bill Clinton won by a margin 30 points in 1992.

Enten said Trump also currently leads Harris by 31 points among voters with degrees from vocational and trade schools. Harris has lost support among non-college graduates of color, although she still leads Trump by 28 points. Biden won this demographic by 45 points in 2020.

“This is part of a larger trend that we're seeing across our politics,” Enten said on CNN, “where Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, are doing very, very well with working-class voters.”

“The fact is that Donald Trump seems to have entered a stronghold of traditional Democratic support and made a lot of moves in ways that a lot of people probably wouldn't have imagined when he was just walking down the escalator in 2015,” Enten added .

In recent years, working-class support has shifted to Republicans, a departure from the historic view of Democrats as champions of workers.

Trump's victory in 2016 was largely due to his strong support among working-class voters, and he has continued to strengthen that base by portraying the Democrats as a party of elites divorced from the struggles of everyday Americans.

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump has sought to appeal to American workers by promising to increase domestic production and industrial employment.

Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns via email outside of regular work hours seeking comment.

While Harris generally did better than Biden in polls across diverse demographics, “Scranton Joe” generally had better standing among the working class.

Earlier this month, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union said it would not support a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, a break with the union's decades-long support of Democrats.

“President Joe Biden won the support of Teamsters voting in local union exit polls between April and July before he left the race,” the union said in a September statement. “But in independent electronic and telephone polls from July to September, a majority of voting members twice chose Trump over Harris for a possible Teamsters endorsement.”

“The union’s extensive member survey found no majority support for Vice President Harris and no overall support among members for President Trump,” it continued.